I don’t think you can bet against America. The country has been remarkably resilient over time. At the same time, I view the sickness that we face as being pretty deep. And I also view the challenges that we have to navigate together as being more profound than any we’ve faced in our history.
~ Dean Ball via The Atlantic
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The bounded rationality of each actor in a system may not lead to decisions that further the welfare of the system as a whole.
~ Donella Meadows
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The increasing control of U.S. mass media by a mere handful of corporations has — rather counterintuitively — created a situation of extreme fragmentation, a kaleidoscope of information options.
~ David Foster Wallace
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Empathize with stupidity and you’re halfway to thinking like an idiot.
~ Iain Banks
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The bottom line is that the abrupt rise in digital interaction following the arrival of the pandemic made knowledge work more tedious and exhausting, helping to fuel the waves of disruption that have followed. If we accept this interpretation of events, however, we must also accept the necessity of continuing to seek change. So long as these new and excessive levels of digital communication persist, more haphazard upheavals will inevitably follow.
~ Cal Newport via The New Yorker
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Rarely do good surprises occur between adversarial nations. Communicating more, rather than less, is far safer.
~ David Frum via The Atlantic
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Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
~ Ernest Hemingway
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The surge of real investment now occurring in semiconductor manufacturing and data centers has been funded primarily by corporate profits and old-fashioned bonds, while the emergence of more speculative and exotically engineered arrangements among A.I. companies are already giving rise to concerns of a bubble. The financialized features of the American system are not what make our robust capital markets the envy of the world.
~ Oren Cass via The New York Times
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Over the past 50 years, American trust in the medical system has declined, as has trust in government, science, and expertise in general. The coronavirus pandemic exploded those trends, creating the world in which we now find ourselves. Public-health agencies did themselves no favors: They often gave out confusing and sometimes conflicting advice. Conspiracy theories grew quickly on social media, and measures such as masking became subject to partisan polarization.
~ Vann Newkirk via The Atlantic
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Where in the 1990s we had parties without politics, we now have politics without parties. This is the strange confluence I have termed hyperpolitics. For traditional political parties, the previous bedrock of Western political stability, it is a lethal tonic.
~ Anton Jäger via The New York Times
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